Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I think it's the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought - that's the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity. "

Tony Harrison

Time

God

Thought

Related Quotes:

" I believe more in the power of drama than in the power of religion. "

" The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets. "

Tony Harrison

See

Watch

" I'm hoping to have a ninth decade like Matisse's. "

Tony Harrison

Hoping

Decade

" Honours seem to be the nature of British life. It's horrible. Maybe I'm mad, but the older I get, the less I want to have honours loaded on me. "

" There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury. "

" I often find myself quoting from Victor Hugo after one of my theatrical ventures. 'Now that my play is a failure,' he once said, 'I find I love it all the more.' I first quoted that after 'Square Rounds' at the Olivier in 1992. "

" I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet. "

" I need to look back on my poetic ventures, make sense of them as a whole, and move forward... and to experiment without external demands. "

" Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry. "

" Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper? "

" Of course you have to provide for the vulnerable and the children, but also, the vulnerable and the children need art in some form or another. You need spiritual experiences that, I think, forms of art give best. "

" Yes, I've got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honour that as well. "

" I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry. "

" The imagination has its limits, and you have to face up to that. "

Tony Harrison

Face

You

" It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century. "

" I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation. "

" I'd rather climb Everest than go for a walk in the park. "

Tony Harrison

Park

Everest

" I've written on public matters, but I don't understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals... anybody who knew my work would know I'm not a contender. "

" For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect. "

Tony Harrison

Poetry

Heart

" Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry. "

" I'm not the sort of person who reads much about himself. "

" A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud. "

Tony Harrison

Poetry

Writing

" I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to. "

" I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel. "

" Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.' "

" I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me. "

Tony Harrison

Covers

Hate

" Looking back, fire images have been constant in my poetry. As a boy, it was my job to light the fire each morning, and I remember the celebratory bonfires at the end of the war. It was from staring into fire that I began my first poetry. "

" I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section. "

" You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger. "

" A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it. "